Abstract
Trevor Pinch is going to leave a huge hole in the social studies of science, for his intellectual contribution and for his personality. Trevor was the nicest person you could ever wish to meet, always encouraging, always smiling, loved by everyone in the field. His varied academic contribution is already recognized in the fact that his intellectual biography has been published twice: an interview with Paolo Magaudda, ‘Studying culture differently: From quantum physics to the music synthesizer: An interview with Trevor Pinch’, published in 2014 in Cultural Sociology, and a book by Simone Tosoni (‘with Trevor Pinch’) entitled Entanglements: Conversations on the Human Traces of Science, Technology, and Sound, published by MIT Press in 2017. What fascinates these authors is Trevor’s range of interests – all the way from arguments about the foundations of quantum theory to the music synthesizer; in the middle were the years of sociology of scientific knowledge when we worked together and then his rise to fame with the sociology of technology; at the very beginning and the very end was the pleasure of playing his homemade synthesizer in a band.
That homemade device was first constructed when he was a physics undergraduate at Imperial College; it was relegated to the storage cupboard in the middle years, then brought out again; it was always around as idea or actual iconic bit of hobbyist technology whenever I visited him in later years. Only now that he’s gone forever have I come to realize that this trajectory is the essence of Trevor: He was always a hippy at heart and that is what made him so easy to love and why he will be so missed. Trevor came to my occasional birthday parties and would wind up taking my long-abandoned Spanish guitar off the wall and sweetly singing Bob Dylan songs. ‘Do you realize you’re singing in praise of drug-dealers’, I’d insist. But the chords and lyrics of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ continued to sweeten the evening air notwithstanding. There are other people in our discipline who proclaim themselves ‘more hippy than thou’, but the truth is to be found in the smile.
Though we stayed friends, our academic projects would diverge. The years we worked together seemed like a lifetime but were to be just one interlude in Trevor’s life. It started in 1975 when he worked as research assistant on my University of Bath based-project on Uri Geller-style paranormal spoon-bending and its interactions with science. Trevor was an enthusiast for the exciting new ways of thinking about science that were taking over – which is why every intense year felt like a decade. Also, he brought to the project an understanding of the foundations of quantum theory, which was going to be important when we needed to get inside the world of the parapsychology community. On the other hand, I had to instruct him not to wear his mother’s old coat on our field trips, but he was, as ever, easygoing about it.
The first book we wrote together, which was eventually published in 1982, was Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science. We learned to get inside the 1960s parapsychological hotbed that we located in California, with Trevor helping us to understand the more ‘way-out’ elements. And we learned to switch back to the orthodox world when we ‘re-entered Earth’s atmosphere’. What we explored in the book was how to see the outcome of the same experimental series in two entirely different ways: In one of the popular gestalt-switch metaphors of the time, we learned how to see it sometimes as a parapsychological duck and sometimes as a mainstream rabbit; we were also showing why it wasn’t possible to see both duck and rabbit at the same time and why it was dangerous to a career to try.
At the end of the project, Trevor signed on at Bath for a PhD, choosing as his topic the controversy over the detection of solar neutrinos. In 1986, he published a very good book out of the PhD called Confronting Nature, but it was a little too late to have the impact it deserved. An original, and lasting concept – ‘externality’ – came out of the neutrino study. Scientists buried big tanks of cleaning fluid (perchlorethylene) under the ground in the hope that neutrinos emitted from the Sun would penetrate the liquid and cause some of the chlorine atoms to mutate into radioactive argon. They’d sweep the tank periodically and mark the incidence of radioactive argon atoms on a chart. What Trevor pointed out was that the scientists then had a choice to make: they could report the marks on the chart, they could report that they had found radioactive argon, they could report they had discovered radioactive argon coming from transmuted chlorine atoms, they could report that these transmutations were caused by neutrinos, or they could report that they had found neutrinos coming from the heart of the Sun. The increasing width of ‘evidential context’ makes the report more and more interesting but more and more open to dispute. That was a brilliant paper and the dilemma continually confronts pioneering experimental scientists. But, again, it didn’t make the impact on the wider community that it should have done and in later years Trevor would chuckle at the idea that it was a candidate to be his best paper, because it was his sociology of technology work that made him famous and the music stuff that gave him the most fulfilment.
As is well known, Trevor started on SCOT – the ‘Social Construction of Technology’ – by forming a partnership with Wiebe Bijker in the early 1980s and this was an immediate success. Together with Thomas Hughes, a historian of technology, they edited The Social Construction of Technological Systems, which was published in 1987. It became so widely known that it gained the nickname ‘The School Bus Book’, reflecting its bright yellow cover. SCOT became one of the dominant themes in science and technology studies and Bijker was awarded the Bernal Prize for lifetime contributions to social studies of science in 2006; knowing how they worked together, I was very surprised that Trevor didn’t receive the award for another twelve years. In the meantime, Trevor and I wrote three Golem books, in 1993, 1998 and 2006. The first of these had a major impact and is still used to introduce students to the significance of the sociology of scientific knowledge approach to history and philosophy of science, and various chapters in the others have had their more than fifteen minutes of fame from time to time. Trevor remained committed to pushing those arguments, but his heart was more and more in SCOT, since this is where his reputation was being formed.
In 1990 he took up what was to become a permanent position at Cornell and it was there that he discovered how to combine technology and music. Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog analog synthesizer, was still living in Trumansberg, just a few miles from Ithaca, and Trevor decided to interview him. Now he was really happy – he could work on music synthesisers as examples of technology, and he had an excuse to dust off his hobbyist machine and become a virtuoso. I remember that quite late on he told me how fulfilling it was to discover that he had another ability – to play innovative music with a local band of friends; his published self-descriptions began to include ‘part-time musician’. So Trevor ended his life fulfilled – a prominent sociologist of science and technology and a welcome guest in musical circles. It was that generosity of personal and intellectual spirit preserved from his early hippy years that made him such a great partner in our research and in our joint writing projects, but also made it natural for him to shift to other projects when the music changed. He went with the flow of felt goodness. And that’s why he had no enemies and that’s why everyone loved him and why we are all going to miss him. He was the only Trevor.